Commander

by Richard F. Weyand

Believe it or not, Dunham hadn’t noticed. It had been only a week or ten days since the process started. Dunham had been preoccupied with astro-political events as the region moved inexorably toward a war he was desperately trying to avoid, and he’d been emotionally and physically exhausted every night by bedtime. And Peters had taken to wearing a sweatshirt to bed to avoid chills that had started to bother her a couple of months back. Reading this book, that would likely go away soon. By the third trimester, pregnant women usually felt hot all the time.

  Tomorrow was Saturday, though. Then he would notice.

  She would make sure of it.

  After lunch, which was their big meal of the day on Saturday, they went up to the pool deck. Bobby was sunning on the chaise when Peters went into the cabana.

  Never underestimate Housekeeping. At her request, they had found a white bikini that would set off her tan skin. A miniscule thong bottom and a top that properly fit – and even emphasized – her new figure.

  She walked from the cabana to the pool and dove in. Dunham was lost in thought, and didn’t even notice. She swam her laps. When she was done, she went over to the ladder and lifted her head up over the edge of the pool.

  “Bobby.”

  Dunham continued to look off into the distance with a blank look on his face.

  “Hey!”

  He started and looked at her.

  “You still at work?” Peters asked.

  “Yes. Sorry, dear.”

  “You’re better off setting it aside for a while, and coming back to it later.”

  “You’re probably right,” Dunham said.

  “Maybe I can give you something else to think about.”

  Now that she had Dunham’s attention, Peters climbed slowly up the ladder, revealing first the white bikini top with her newly enhanced cleavage, and then the miniscule white bottom that served to emphasize rather than to hide. She walked forward to the foot of his chaise, then reached behind her back, unfastened the top, and threw it aside.

  “Time for some R and R, Marine.”

  “Oh my God. Those are new.”

  “Not new, merely enhanced. I guess it comes with the whole pregnancy thing.”

  “Well, I have to say they look good on you.”

  “Just don’t ask me to walk up any stairs. I’d fall flat on my face.”

  “I’m not sure your face would hit the ground.”

  “Very funny.”

  “You’d probably bounce.”

  Peters kicked his foot.

  “Hey, Mr. Emperor Bigshot. You just gonna sit there and talk about ‘em, or you gonna take ‘em out for a spin?”

  Afterwards, laying cuddled on the chaise, Dunham mused on the original topic.

  “Well, that was fun. Those are pretty amazing. Do they stay that way now, or do they go back down once you’re finished breast-feeding?”

  “Yes and yes. Yes, they go back down somewhat, and yes, they stay somewhat larger from now on. How much of which I don’t know. Everybody’s different, apparently.”

  “Huh. Well, I don’t have any complaints with any or all of the above.”

  “I hope they go back down at least some. This feels a bit ridiculous.”

  “Nah. You’ll get used to it.”

  “I suppose.”

  They lay quietly for a while. Peters broke the silence.

  “So, having convinced you to set your worries aside for a while, what did I miss yesterday?”

  Dunham told her about the ambiguous testing results on the materials recovered from the debris of the destroyed raiders.

  “So you don’t know.”

  “I know, but I can’t prove it. Like Dee, knowing it was Pomeroy, Stanier, Galbraith, and Newsom who were plotting against her. But I can’t prove it, so I can’t act. Which is my preference, anyway.”

  “It is?” Peters asked.

  “Sure. I don’t want to take on the independent star nations and the DP all at once. I would rather take them on and defeat them one at a time.”

  “But Sintar is going to win, anyway.”

  “Of course.”

  “You sound so sure.”

  “I am sure.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “Because if I have to, I’ll cheat.”

  “You’ll cheat on the Treaty of Earth.”

  “Of course. Any reasonable person would likely conclude our new weapon is by definition a nuclear weapon. If I have to, I’ll simply deny it’s a nuclear weapon and wipe out their capitals. I’d rather go for decapitation strikes than to kill the billions of people in their militaries it would take to beat their elites into submission. Kill the elites and the problem goes away. The average person doesn’t want war. The elites use war like any other policy tool, because they’re not going to be the ones getting shot at.”

  “Won’t history judge you harshly?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because history is written by the winners.”

  Addenda

  “One of the self-propelled HARPER units failed in the field. Complete lack of propulsion,” Jared Denny told the group.

  “Were they able to rescue the unit for inspection?” Narang asked.

  “No. I don’t know the circumstances, but my understanding is they were under a time constraint, and there was some material it was important to extricate, so they rescued the material but not the HARPER unit.”

  “They didn’t leave it laying around out there, did they?” Liu Jiang asked.

  “No. They destroyed the unit. Means unspecified. So we don’t actually have the particular unit that failed. However, we do have the telemetry back and forth to it. And I did look into failures of these propulsion units during their use in spacedock operations, and it appears to be pretty common. Not a big deal in spacedock, they just run out another one and repair the failed one. I was thinking we might be able to do better than that, and design out the initial cause of failure. Or at least to be able to predict it far enough in advance to service the unit prior to failure.”

  “That should be workable,” Robert Stewart said, “if we have enough data on the failures.”

  “The spacedock people keep pretty good records. They’re used to it with regard to ship building and repairs, and that attitude just sort of bleeds over into this as well. The records looked pretty good to me.”

  “Excellent,” Stewart said.

  “So, Bob, I wondered if you could work this one with us. Not just advise in this case. It’s pretty clear I can put anything I want to in Project X and it’ll be approved. I haven’t had a single invoice questioned. We just need to line-item everything properly. So we need you to consult on this project.”

  “Of course,” Stewart said. “I’d be happy to. See if we can’t clean up the design of those propulsion units.”

  “Your Highness, we have the initial reports back from our search of the debris field of our eight light cruisers and the Sintaran picket ships,” said the Honorable Bruce Mallory, Prime Minister of Phalia.

  “Excellent, Mr. Mallory. And what have they found?”asked Queen Anne III, hereditary ruler of Phalia.

  “Mostly what one would expect, Ma’am, with one big exception. They found eight distorted masses of depleted uranium alloy. From the shapes, it looks like these might have been the noses of the Sintaran picket ships.”

  “Is that why they were impervious to point-defense fire?”

  “Very likely. The curious thing is they are perhaps ten percent of the dry mass of the entire vessel.”

  “Are you sure these are not part of our cruisers, Mr. Mallory?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. There is nothing of the kind in our light cruisers. They must have come from the Sintaran ships.”

  “How do they even turn such a ship, with that much of its mass out in front, Mr. Mallory?”

  “We believe they’re using bow thrusters, Ma’am.”

  “Ah. Clever. So it’s basically a uranium bullet. That’s why it didn’t just cru
mple against the more heavily built ships.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “Very well. Good work. Please pass on my compliments to our search and research teams.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  SCV Heritage of Space down-transitioned from hyperspace in the Monserrat system, one of the principal commercial centers of the Kingdom of Phalia. With eighteen thousand populated planets and forty-five trillion people, Phalia was a huge client of Sintaran goods, and Sintaran freighters regularly made call on hundreds of planets.

  Half an hour after Heritage of Space appeared, a Sintaran picket ship dropped out of hyperspace. There was no raider here, though, and all in-system ships were squawking transponder codes. The picket ship remained where it was as Heritage of Space made its way in-system to the commercial space station in orbit about Monserrat.

  Its charge safely delivered, the picket ship turned and started accelerating away from Monserrat, even as it transmitted its position back to Sintar.

  Almost a week later, the HMS Baba Yaga dropped out of hyperspace with sixteen picket ships as escort. She stayed just long enough to project a hypergate for the escort picket ship and her own sixteen consorts. The picket ships disappeared into the hypergate, and then the Baba Yaga pulled the hypergate over herself and disappeared.

  Democracy of Planets Prime Minister Harold Pinter was meeting with Foreign Minister Jules Morel and Defense Minister Pavel Isaev.

  “So how is the Sintar project going?” Pinter asked

  “Good, I think,” Morel said. “The initial losses of freighters has led Sintar to send an escort with every freighter heading into the independent star nations.”

  “Can they afford to do that?”

  “The escort is a single picket ship. They must have millions of those. So yes, they can afford to do that.”

  “A single picket ship? Not much of an escort.”

  “These have proven to be a problem, Harold,” Isaev said. “We’re not sure how, but they have managed to kill any of our light cruisers they run up against. We’ve lost a couple of dozen ships to the darned things.”

  “Really. I would think a picket ship would be easy pickings for a light cruiser.”

  “Not these. The remote sensor recordings our friends have shared with us are from necessarily far away, but it appears they overwhelmed our light cruisers by simply ramming them, for the loss of both ships.”

  “The cruiser couldn’t fire on it, Pavel?”

  “Oh, they did, Harold. In some cases they did, in others they ran away. But the picket ship was accelerating at ten gravities, evaded our missiles, and then proved stubbornly immune to point-defense fire.”

  Pinter thought about it for a moment.

  “What’s the maximum acceleration a human can stand?”

  “For the twenty-minute pursuit that was typical? Perhaps six or seven gravities.”

  “So these picket ships have to be robot ships.”

  “Robots or remotely piloted, I would say. Yes. That’s our current thinking.”

  “Which is why they aren’t concerned about suiciding one against a light cruiser. They don’t lose any men, and the tonnage trade is very much in their favor.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But it does give us another lever, Harold,” Morel said. “You know what people think of robot ships. And history gives plenty of reason to fear them.”

  “Yes, Jules. But these are probably remotely piloted, as Pavel points out.”

  “We’re not emphasizing that to our friends, Harold. We’re unequivocally calling them robot ships. And one now appears with every Sintaran freighter down-transitioning into their star systems.”

  “Yeah, they’re not going to be happy about that.”

  “They’re not. It plays into the notion Sintar is no longer playing according to the rules. A flotilla of these robot ships wiped out a light cruiser squadron in Phalia. In Garland, when a heavy cruiser squadron and a battleship squadron challenged four of them, forty more robot ships made down transition, and the Garland Space Navy fled.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Yes. They have everyone terrified. And in Garland, they seized a Sintaran freighter and its crew after its robot escort took out one of our light cruisers. Emperor Trajan demanded their release, and King James threatened to execute them for piracy.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes. And in response, Emperor Trajan told King James if he harmed the Sintaran spacers – if the Garland commercial freight station was not open to normal commercial operations per the commercial shipping regulations – the station was a valid military target and he would destroy it.”

  “Would he really do that?”

  “I don’t know why not. He did it to King Michael of Estvia a few years back. Destroyed a commercial space station in orbit around Galveston. Two million dead.”

  “Yes, of course. I recall.”

  Pinter shook his head.

  “Well, I have to say, I was skeptical of this whole project from the beginning, but it appears you are making it work. Congratulations to both of you.”

  “Thanks, Harold.”

  ”So what’s next?”

  “Nothing. We just let the Sintaran escorts continue to aggravate people and anger them further. Let things run their course from here.”

  “So now that it’s up to a boil, we turn the heat down and put the lid on and let the situation simmer.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What are the chances it boil over?”

  “Not high, I don’t think. But it should accomplish Karla Jaeger’s goals to slow the growth of Sintaran shipping and its import-export trade, or even reduce them. The governments are putting pressure on their commercial companies not to use Sintaran shipping firms or use or sell their products.”

  “Excellent. Well done.”

  When Peters entered the third trimester, She and Dunham met with Dr. Ernst Kuffel, the obstetrician Peters had selected. They met in the lower of the two top floors of the Imperial Palace, the two floors dedicated to the Imperial Residence. In addition to the gym, hairdresser’s, doctor’s office, emergency room, dentist’s office, indoor swimming pool, and other amenities for the exclusive use of the Emperor – and now the Co-Consul, Saaret, and his wife Suzanne – a birthing room was also being installed.

  Because Peters, through her nanites, knew the exact day of ovulation, there was little guesswork required as to the stage of development of the twins she was carrying.

  “So when can I expect to go into labor, Doctor? Thirty-eight weeks, right? And I’m at twenty-four weeks now?”

  “Normal labor usually begins now at thirty-seven weeks after conception, Milady, or thirty-nine weeks from the last menses. From the nanites, we know the exact date of ovulation, so we don’t need to include those extra two weeks in there. In more primitive conditions, in conditions of hardship, it’s usually more like thirty-eight weeks. So I would expect thirty-seven weeks.

  “However, I would counsel against waiting that long.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “His Majesty is tall, and large-framed. Apparently his whole family is. The Empress Ilithyia II was also tall and not slender. In contrast, Milady, you are not of the same stature, and are slender. The mismatch would militate for an early delivery even if you were not carrying twins. With twins, however, I think we should definitely select an earlier delivery date. You’re carrying large babies – two of them – and, given your size, there simply isn’t a lot of room in there. It poses a risk both to them and to you.”

  “I see. Which is why I am well above the weight curve for twenty-four weeks.”

  “Yes. I haven’t worried about it, Milady, because of the size of the father and that you’re carrying twins, but you are going to stay above the weight curve throughout your pregnancy. At some point, it will become a health issue for you.”

  “You said ‘select an earlier delivery date.’ We can pick?”

  “Yes, of course. We can now
initiate labor when it is convenient. We give your body the hormonal signals your internal apparatus needs to see to start its work, and then you have a normal delivery at the time of your choosing. It’s much easier and more convenient than the whole middle-of-the-night thing when you are already exhausted after thirty-eight weeks of pregnancy.”

  “When do you recommend?”

  “I would think twenty-nine weeks or so.”

  “Only five weeks off?”

  “Yes. Anything from twenty-seven or so weeks is considered acceptable. There’s something of a wall at twenty-five weeks. That’s when normal brain waves begin. The two lobes of the brain synch up and take over a lot of bodily functions the baby needs to survive outside the womb. Shorter-term pregnancies than that are still a considerable problem in terms of survivability. You are looking at full life support of the baby at that point until it catches up. But anything from twenty-seven weeks on is simple. I would think twenty-nine, or maybe even thirty, just to be safe.”

  “Will they need special care?”

  “Yes, a bit. But it is a simple matter to turn one of the bedrooms upstairs into a neonatal intensive care unit for the two months required.”

  Kuffel shrugged.

  “It’s been done before. I inquired.”

  “I see.”

  Amanda turned to Dunham, who had said nothing to this point.

  “What do you think, Bobby?”

  “I don’t know anything about any of this, Amanda, but what the doctor says sounds sensible to me. If you’re carrying Dunham-sized twins in there, they’re just plain gonna run out of room. If the early delivery is as routine as the doctor says –“ Dunham looked to the doctor here, who nodded “– then it makes a lot of sense.”

  “OK, I think I agree. Both of my parents are slight, and both of your parents are big. No mismatch for either of them. But the crossbreed between us is another matter. And being done with being this big early sounds good to me. I’m coming up on twenty pounds already. As long as the early delivery’s not a threat to my babies.”

  “It will be a lot easier on everybody, I think,” Kuffel said. “Should we say twenty-nine weeks then, or thirty?”